Real Talk with Norm Macdonald

Over lunch at a greasy spoon, the classicist comedian talks through his new Netflix series, “Norm Macdonald Has a Show.”

Set loose in San Jose, California, recently, with some time to kill before the evening’s standup sets, the comedian Norm Macdonald made plans to see the Winchester Mystery House—a mansion of notoriously strange design—and to find lunch, though maybe not precisely in that order. It was past noon, but he hadn’t eaten. He was wearing a baggy tangerine-colored polo shirt, billowing sweatpants, and red shoes. “Do you know anywhere that is a diner with a booth?” he inquired of the concierge in his hotel’s lobby. “I don’t mind a greasy spoon.”

Since stepping back from the daily grind of TV, more than a decade ago, Macdonald, most widely known as the mid-nineties host of “Weekend Update,” on “Saturday Night Live,” and the star of an eponymous sitcom, has been burrowing into his first loves: writing and talking. In 2016, he published a fictionalized memoir loosely inspired by Hunter S. Thompson. From 2013 to 2017, while doing standup, he hosted a popular Video Podcast Network series, “Norm Macdonald Live,” on which he and a sidekick, Adam Eget, led actors and comics in meandering klatch sessions. The podcast felt less like an interview program than like eavesdropping on the interesting people in the next booth, and it became the template for Macdonald’s new venture: a ten-episode Netflix talk show, out this month. Guests include Jane Fonda, Judge Judy, and David Letterman, who is also a producer.

Piqued with hunger, Macdonald headed to a luncheonette, called Peggy Sue’s, a couple of blocks away. He is more than six feet tall, and moves with lumbering delicacy, like a gaunt bear that has just come out of hibernation. His assistant, the aspiring comic John Steere, marched ahead of him, following a map on his iPhone. A festival had started in the Plaza de César Chávez. ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” played on giant speakers.

“Oh, I hate that,” Macdonald said. “I couldn’t hate that fucking more.” He’d lost his sunglasses; he’s been losing eyewear since the age of nine, when he misplaced his prescription glasses. Now fifty-eight, he still has not replaced them. “I guess if I put on glasses now everything would be high-def,” he said.

At the diner, in a booth, Macdonald ordered a beef sandwich with a bowl of dip, and Steere ordered chili in a sourdough bowl. They talked about the ideal kind of talking. “I was trying to make it real intimate,” Macdonald said of his Netflix series, which is called “Norm Macdonald Has a Show.” Most guests are camera-savvy, but he likes to throw them off their talk-show shtick by keeping the production loose. At one point, someone drove a forklift through a shot.

“That looks fake, but it really happened,” Steere said.

“I’d never tell anyone when the show had started,” Macdonald explained. “The guy would be doing my makeup, and I’d go, ‘What the fuck are you doing? I’m trying to do a show.’ ” One guest, David Spade, wondered aloud whether he’d been summoned for a test episode. “That’s the spirit of the show,” Macdonald said.

They talked so long that they lost their spot at the Winchester Mystery House. On the elevator back to his hotel suite, Macdonald talked about interviewing Lorne Michaels, who had seemed unfriendly to the prospect of discussing “S.N.L.” ’s early years. (“He’s, like, ‘When are we getting out of the seventies?’ ”) Upstairs, he talked on the phone with his brother (“I’m in San Jose, remember?”), and Steere vaped. Then, with Steere still vaping, they talked through some jokes that Steere would use to warm up the crowd before Macdonald’s standup that night.

“I feel so guilty,” Steere read, trying out a joke about his dog. “He gets me girls, and I cut off his balls.”

Macdonald scrunched up his face. “It sounds like you feel bad because he got you girls and then you cut off his balls,” he said.

Macdonald’s taste in comedy is, by his own description, formalist and classicist. He barred political jokes on his new show. Comedy that lives on Netflix, he thinks, can’t be dated, and, anyway, political talk is now gratuitous, a dead weight on comic communication. When Roseanne Barr, who gave Macdonald his first TV job, and Louis C.K., who wrote the foreword to his book, were driven out of work by scandal, he put the two of them in touch so they could talk their feelings out.

That night, on the way to the San Jose Improv, Macdonald talked, with bafflement, of current “Saturday Night Live” cast members dating celebrities. (“When we were there, we were scared of the real celebrities.”) In the greenroom, he ate a lot of melon and began to talk about his esteem for “War and Peace.” He talked to a bartender as he ordered two Red Bulls. (Macdonald doesn’t drink.) When a producer arrived to walk him to the stage, he began talking to himself. (“Getting nervous . . .”) Then, still clutching a Red Bull, Macdonald strode to the microphone. Standing before the cheering crowd, he started, at last, to talk his talk for real. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the September 10, 2018, issue, with the headline “Real Talk.”

Nathan Heller began contributing to The New Yorker in 2011 and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2013.